Volume of Refactoring Ahead

In the previous post, I described the simple rewriting case that I am working on at the moment. Someone was quick to point out that the approach wouldn’t work for all methods (XPIDL Arrays were the example). Indeed, anything more complicated than simple getters can’t be rewritten to “Succeeded/Failed” pattern without switching to C++ exceptions. However, in the codebase the size of Mozilla there are several megabytes worth outparam getters to be rewritten.

Currently my wimpy little outparams.js script identifies 100 methods that can be rewritten by outparamdel without any manual intervention. However doing a search for ::Get with a ** parameter yields over 2700 candidates, of which most look like they can be rewritten. Reason for the laughable detection rate is that the detection script currently refuses to flag methods that are defined in XPIDL interface or are implemented by more than one class. Soon the script will make heavier use of the class hierarchy and we will probably change XPIDL to support more efficient getters.

Complete Class Hierarchy

I finally managed to convince Dehydra to serialize the Mozilla class hierarchy into JSON files without running out of virtual memory. This will generate lots of input for refactoring and analysis tools. All kinds of interesting stats can be produced with simple scripts. Generating the index is relatively straightforward. It would be awesome if someone could figure out how to expose this data as a web app. Since there is so much being loaded incrementally, I don’t see how one can keep things simple but use an asynchronous API.

In the coming months, I am looking forward to extending this to be a complete callgraph to find dead code and other fun data.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 5:53 pm and is filed under dehydra, outparamdel.
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